Author: Kevin Drum

A recent podcast from the Niskanen Center focuses on whether political elites have a good sense of what the public believes. Short answer: not really. Alex Furnas, a professor at Northwestern's business school, summarizes his research this way:

We found that for policies that elites themselves strongly favored, they overestimated public support by about 12 percentage points. And for policies that they themselves strongly opposed, they underestimated public support by about 12 percentage points. So there’s sort of a 20 to 25 percentage point difference in elite evaluations of public support for policy, depending on whether the individual elite strongly supports or strongly opposes that policy.

Here's the chart:

Basically, liberals think the public is more liberal than it is, and conservatives think the public is more conservative than it is. But there are exceptions:

• The public favors a wealth tax even more than liberals do.
• The public dislikes a path to citizenship even more than conservatives do.
• The public hates carbon taxes.
• But they love low-income clean energy.

Elsewhere in the podcast, Adam Thal, a political science professor at Loyola Marymount, talks about elite perceptions of poor people:

Why do politicians sort of ignore problems facing low income people in the United States?... There’s good reason to think that because they don’t experience a lot of economic problems themselves, they might underestimate the scale of those problems, not really understand how bad things are for low income families.

....I did not find that to be the case.... [But] there’s definite polarization. Democrats in particular tend to really overestimate the scale of these economic problems. Republicans are less likely to overestimate them and in some conditions underestimate them.

It turns out that political elites know perfectly well how tough things are for poor people. In fact, Democrats overplay this significantly. As for Republicans, they have a pretty accurate sense of things but just don't feel like doing anything about it. Their lack of concern has nothing to do with misperceptions. It's deliberate.

There was nothing super interesting about this year's BLS report on union density. Total union density declined slightly from 10.1% to 10.0% and private sector union density stayed the same at 6.0%. But I did notice something peculiar. Even though overall union density barely changed, there were significant movements in individual states. Here are the top ten gainers and losers:

Hawaii, which already had the highest union density in the country at 21.9%, was also the biggest gainer, ending 2023 at 24.1%. Rhode Island was off the charts at the other end, plummeting from 16.1% to 12.3%.

These seem like awfully big movements for a single year. I don't really understand it. And what the hell happened in Rhode Island?

Over lunch I was pondering the fact that people forget so quickly about the problems of the past, which is part of what makes the problems of the present seem so overwhelming and unique. But just compare today to the late '60s, the era of Vietnam, the Cold War, the Six Day War, race riots, rivers catching on fire, assassinations, campus unrest, drugs, the Democratic Convention, the Moynihan report, and so much more. We look pretty good

But that's too easy. How about comparing the present to the calmest decade of recent years? I guess that would be the '90s, right? The Cold War was over, the internet was booming, the economy was great. Those were the days!

But it didn't always seem that way at the time. I trawled through Time covers of the '90s to see what was on our minds back then, and it's sort of amazing—even to me—how much of it is not just familiar, but nearly identical. Just think of all the things we've forgotten about: Good jobs going away;¹ crack babies;² obesity;³ wars in the Gulf, Somalia, and Kosovo;⁴ sarin gas; sex trafficking;⁵ music and movies debasing us;⁶ Los Angeles is doomed;⁷ Asia is out-competing us;⁸ the incredible shrinking president;⁹ gun violence out of control;¹⁰ the AIDS epidemic;¹¹ superpredators; busybodies and crybabies;¹² OJ; genocide in Rwanda;¹³ Timothy McVeigh; Newt Gingrich;¹⁴ Whitewater;¹⁵ Matthew Shepard; rampant crime;¹⁶ Muslim terrorism;¹⁷ impeachment;¹⁸ kids are slackers;¹⁹ Milosovic; cyberporn;²⁰ Columbine;²¹ the new racism;²² is a presidential candidate too old?²³

And that's a good decade.

¹cf. Millennials are screwed
²cf. fentanyl
³cf. obesity and Ozempic
⁴cf. Ukraine and Gaza
⁵cf. Pizzagate, Epstein, etc.
⁶cf. social media disinformation
⁷We're still here!
⁸cf. China taking our jobs
⁹cf. Biden is so unpopular
¹⁰cf. gun violence is out of control
¹¹cf. COVID-19
¹²cf. Karens
¹³cf. genocide in Gaza
¹⁴cf. Donald Trump
¹⁵cf. Hunter Biden
¹⁶cf. allegedly rampant crime
¹⁷cf. Muslim terrorism
¹⁸cf. impeachment
¹⁹cf. kids are slackers
²⁰cf. social media is destroying our youth
²¹cf. Sandy Hook etc.
²²cf. DEI and social justice
²³cf. Joe Biden is too old

Jeez. AP called New Hampshire for both Trump and Biden about one minute after the polls closed? That's gotta be a new record. The exits must have been a tidal wave.

Here is the growth of US energy production since the beginning of the Biden administration:

Note that energy use is seasonal, so comparisons have to be made between the same month in different years. The latest data is for October 2023, so all comparisons are between October 2020 and October 2023.

Bob Somerby takes me to task today for posting a clip of Donald Trump that he says is grossly misleading and dishonest. I don't agree. The Biden campaign's snarky summary is fairly conventional Twitter abridgment and the video is right there for anyone who wants more. It wouldn't pass muster in a PhD dissertation, but it's fairly unremarkable in the context of a quick hit in a political campaign.

But agree to disagree! What I'm really curious about is Bob's response to Trump's declaration that we've become a pitiful country that can't solve even the smallest problem:

Just with regard to that one state of affairs, who can doubt the accuracy of what Trump said? Who can doubt the accuracy of the claim that we have become a nation that can't solve the simplest problem?

Of course we've become a nation which can't solve the smallest problem! It isn't perfectly easy to dole out blame for that situation, but the accuracy of the basic statement is blindingly obvious.

....We have become a small, pitiful nation "which is incapable of solving even the smallest problem." Everybody knows that's true—and in our view, a lot of that stems from our blue tribe's unintelligent behavior over the past many years, though your assessments may differ.

Huh? The United States, despite polarized politics and one major party that's all but insane, has been cruising along and solving problems at a remarkable clip for the past couple of decades. We've passed tax cuts, bankruptcy reform, Obamacare, financial reform, and an infrastructure act. We created and distributed a COVID-19 vaccine in less than a year and made it through the pandemic in better shape than nearly all our peer countries. We invented modern AI and we dominate the tech world. Our economy is the most vigorous on the planet. We've slashed crime, teen pregnancies, cigarette smoking, cancer deaths, air and water pollution, and HIV. Our educational system is one of the best.

Are there problems we haven't solved? Of course.¹ But there always are. Contrary to the mass depression that seems to have settled over so many of us, neither the US nor the world are undergoing a "polycrisis"—one of the most fatuous notions I've heard in a long time. In fact, the world is in remarkably calm and resilient shape, but only if you take your head out of the sand long enough to recall what things were like in the recent past.

Just stop it.

¹Fentanyl, illegal immigration, climate change, mass shootings, persistent deficits, racism, Fox News, obesity, falling fertility, social media disinformation, poor life expectancy, the Black-white educational gap, aquifer deterioration, housing shortages, pickleball beefs, mass incarceration, delusional conspiracy theorizing, student debt, Donald Trump, door plugs popping off of airplanes, and kids these days. Feel free to add to this list.

This is the St. Martin Canal in Paris, somewhere near République, I think, where a lock takes it underground. The lock was used back in the day, when boats cruised the canal for both commerce and pleasure, and it's still functional. I don't know how often it actually gets used anymore, though.

The Chevron rules says that if a law is ambiguous, courts should defer to any reasonable interpretation of the agency charged with enforcing it. Jonah Goldberg doesn't like this:

The question of whether the judicial or the executive branches should be the final word on regulatory policies misses the elephant in the room: Congress should be the first word.

If Congress wants to pass a law requiring fishermen to pay for monitors on fishing boats it can. Likewise, it can pass laws to forgive student debt, legalize marijuana, clarify free-speech issues for social media, provide amnesty for illegal immigrants, build a border wall, and a thousand other things.

But it doesn’t. Instead, Congress does one of three things: 1) Nothing at all 2) Write deliberately vague legislation punting hard decisions to Cabinet secretaries and administrators or 3) Lobby the executive branch to do things Congress is too cowardly to do itself.

This is a common complaint, and there are times when it has some force. But I think it mostly misses the point. The problem isn't that Congress is cowardly. The problem is that the world has long since become far too complex and fast changing for Congress to write detailed laws that stand the test of time.

Take, for example, the massive financial reform act passed in 2010. It was a thousand pages long, and even so it took a full decade to create the detailed rules implementing it. There's no way Congress could ever have done that. It's not just lack of expertise, it's the fact that even for experts it took ten years.

This is why the Supreme Court in 1984 adopted the Chevron rule unanimously. Unanimously! And just consider what it means that Congress nonetheless delegates so much authority to rulemaking agencies. It means that both parties are willing to let the executive branch make rules regardless of who controls the White House. There's no way this would happen unless they were absolutely convinced there was no other way.

And there isn't. Federal laws are already inhumanly labyrinthine and complex. It defies common sense to believe that Congress could pass even more complex laws that foresee every possible twist and turn of time and tide. Giving authority to federal agencies isn't a betrayal of its duty; it's just Congress bowing to reality.

Once you accept this, you need only decide what to do about all that rulemaking. Should courts generally defer to Congress's express desire to delegate it to the executive branch? Or should they insert themselves into every petty controversy de novo? Your mileage may vary, but I think the question answers itself.

I agree with Charles Cooke!

I don’t know how much more plainly I can say it than this: If you believe that Donald Trump represents a unique threat to democracy — as Joe Biden and his team keep saying that they do — then you should not want Donald Trump on the ballot. There are no exceptions to this rule. If Trump is the nominee, he has a chance of winning. If he is a threat to the republic, he ought not to be in a position from which he has a chance of winning. The moment — the very moment — that you start muttering about jolts of energy to voters and donors, or about the best contrast to be drawn, or about motivators of Democrats, you have signaled that you don’t actually consider Trump to be the risk that you say you do.

Hey, this is bound to happen occasionally. But he's right: Even if you think Trump is the easiest Republican to beat, you shouldn't be hoping he'll be their nominee. He could win, after all. Even if the fundamentals are against him, stuff can happen. Maybe the economy goes sour. Maybe Biden has a heart attack. Who knows?

It goes without saying that I have no love for Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley. But they are ordinary Republicans. The country will survive four or eight years of a Republican presidency, just like it always has. But another four years of Trump? The country will survive, but it will come out the other end pretty damaged.

But at this point it no longer matters. Trump is going to be the nominee, and now we just have to make sure he doesn't win.

The top chart shows total federal social welfare spending (adjusted for inflation) since 1960. The bottom chart breaks out the categories for 2023 so you can see exactly what I'm including.

The trendline in the top chart is for 1960-2019, extended through 2023. Social welfare spending surged during the pandemic for obvious reasons, and is now back on its pre-pandemic trend.

NOTE: All data comes from OMB Table 11.3 except for recent SNAP figures, which come from the USDA. All figures are adjusted for inflation using the PCE index.